Praise for Shooting Crows
‘Shooting Crows is a meticulously researched and sharply written account of an astonishing series of events. It provides riveting insights into the way in which power can be abused in modern Ireland.’
Noel Doran, former Editor, Irish News
‘Trevor Birney masterfully lays bare the history of collusion betwen loyalsist murderers and their British masters. Shooting Crows should be taught in every college in the British Isles, and read by all its citizens. Historic work.’
Academy Award winner Terry George
‘The deadly murderous campaign by loyalism is chilling enough but the involvement of the British state is absolutely shocking. A remarkable story brilliantly told.’
Denzil McDaniel, former Editor, Impartial Reporter
Trevor Birney is an Emmy-nominated film producer, director and journalist who began his career at The Impartial Reporter newspaper on the border in Fermanagh. In 2017 he produced the groundbreaking documentary No Stone Unturned, about the 1994 murder by UVF gunmen of six Catholics in Loughinisland, Co. Down. Following the film’s premiere, the PSNI launched an investigation into the alleged leaking of secret documents and arrested Birney and his colleague, Barry McCaffrey. Police later apologised and paid both journalists significant damages. His first book was the bestselling Quinn (Merrion Press, 2022).
Prologue
Executive Action
My wife, Sheila, is a fitful sleeper and a slave to an alarm, which isn’t a great mix for a good night’s rest. However, shortly after 7 a.m. on that final bank holiday weekend in the summer of 2018, she was awoken not by an alarm or her own fitfulness, but by the sound of cars in the drive outside our home in East Belfast.
She walked to the window, opened the shutter and narrated the scene in our driveway as I began to stir. ‘There’s a lot of police in our drive, cars everywhere; what are they doing here?’
Her final words were accompanied by the sound of banging on our front door. Continuous heavy bangs.
Despite the rude awakening, Sheila remained totally unflustered as she closed over the shutter again and came away from the window. While I got out of bed and she dressed, we both remained in the dark.
I mumbled, ‘It’s about Loughinisland,’ as I sneaked a peek through the shutters. It didn’t fluster her as she continued to get dressed. She had never experienced anything like this before – neither had I for that matter – but she met it head-on, like she had been dealing with such situations all her life. In that moment, before we left the bedroom, her self-possession set a distinct tone for what lay ahead – we can deal with this, it assured.
Next door to our room there were three kids in the one bed – our youngest daughter Freya, along with her cousins Gabriel and Liv, who, along with Sheila’s niece, Sarah, and Sarah’s husband, James, had arrived at our home the evening before to spend the long weekend with us. We’d had other sleeping arrangements for Gabriel and Liv, but in the
excitement of being together again, they had all ended up bunking in together. Upstairs, was our eldest Ella and middle daughter Mia, with James and Sarah in the room at the top of the house. None of them seemed to have heard the commotion that had woken Sheila.
Speaking of my wife, she was now armoured in a sweatshirt and jogging bottoms and left our room to confront whoever was trying to break our front door down. I held back, still fumbling about in the dark to find clothes, while at the same time trying to get hold of the one person in the world who would understand the position that was quickly dawning on me: my solicitor, Niall Murphy. He had warned us that this day could come.
No answer. It was 7 a.m., after all. He would still be asleep at his home across the city in Glengormley, if he hadn’t already left to spend the weekend in his happy place: Donegal.
I could hear Sheila downstairs. By now, she had opened the front door. Disjointed and disordered male voices were echoing up the stairs from our hallway.
Mia, our sixteen-year-old, appeared in the bedroom. No one who has ever come across Mia will be surprised to learn that she was the first to respond. Since she was no height – well, she still is no height, having inherited such status from my side of the family – she has built a reputation for managing not only her own affairs, but the family’s too, and at times even our film productions, all with an attitude of serious intent that borders on the hint of a threat.
‘Get hold of Murph, tell him the police are here,’ I said.
Mia raised her phone to her ear; she didn’t have to ask questions. For whatever reason, she already had Niall’s number in her phone book (which might go some way to explaining her reputation). She understood the task. Niall wasn’t going to get any more sleep that morning.
I made my way downstairs, safe in the knowledge that no matter what was about to reveal itself, Mia’s tenacity and Niall’s legal experience would soon come to bear on the situation. By the time I reached the hallway, there was what seemed like an army of police officers dressed in blue boiler suits, revolvers holstered by their side, coming through the front door. There was no time to take it in.
Sheila was already in the kitchen, at the back of the house, remonstrating with a tall, moustached officer, who, at first glance – maybe because he was holding a clipboard – seemed to be the one in charge. There was no doubt he was the one getting the full force of Sheila’s frustration. I went into the kitchen to join them and, having realised I was there, the officer turned away from Sheila and introduced himself to me. With the noise and the chaos around us, I could hardly take in what he was saying. I heard his name and rank but was largely distracted by what the rest of his colleagues were doing as they continued to flow into the ground floor of the house.
I quickly wheeled back as he laid out a piece of paper on the stainlesssteel island. He brushed it flat with his hand and began to explain what he was doing in our kitchen at 7 a.m. on a Friday morning. I heard No Stone Unturned for the first time that day, confirming my suspicions and laying to rest the niggling fear that I had somehow brought all this on my family for some legitimately criminal reason that had simply slipped my mind. He said he was investigating matters relating to the aforementioned documentary, and they were here to search the house for documents that were protected under the Official Secrets Act (OSA).
I reacted to this with both relief and incredulity. I wasn’t going to tell him, but there were no documents whatsoever in the house that had any connection to the film. The tall officer – who had a hint of a North Antrim accent, I thought – was still talking, but I’d heard all I needed to hear for the moment.
My mind was racing. So they were going to search the house. Okay, we could handle that, although it wasn’t going to be much fun for the small kids. But they had clearly gone to all this bother to search the house for a document we had made no secret of having in our possession. We had plastered the bloody thing all over the documentary, which had been released to the world over a year earlier. This didn’t make much sense. So what was it really about?
By then, some of the kids had begun to appear. Sheila moved to comfort them and lead them into one of the other rooms, away from the police. James, who had pulled on a blue jumper and shorts, was also there.
Seeing his face, I realised just how shocking the scene must be. He had grown up in Kent, after all, a world away from the conflict in the North of Ireland. He had likely never had much cause to have any interaction with a police officer. Now he was surrounded by them. His puzzlement and bemusement were sketched all over his face. He looked at me in a way that screamed in an out-of-place south-of-England accent, ‘What the hell is this all about then?’
Out of the sea of blue-uniformed officers, a small, somewhat burly man appeared in the kitchen beside me: Detective Constable Andy Allen. He was there for one thing only, I was soon to discover.
Andy was in plain clothes and spoke in a quiet, almost apologetic manner. ‘Can I talk with you in the living room?’ he asked, while also introducing a female colleague who was in charge of the operation. Her surname immediately struck me. I remembered a very senior detective in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) who shared the same name. The big guy with the Ballymena accent stepped back. I didn’t understand what the arrival of the guy in plain clothes meant, but I could see that this had all been rehearsed.
I followed Detective Allen through the armed police and into the living room at the front of the house, seeing for the first time the full force of the law that had come down upon us, the driveway full of marked and unmarked police vehicles. Beyond them, I could see Land Rovers out on the street. It was going to be an interesting morning for my neighbours.
Andy was keen to get on with the real business of the day: ‘I’m arresting you,’ he said. He then proceeded to read what journalists would regard as a pre-prepared statement, listing the offences of which the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) believed I was guilty. So they aren’t here just to search the house then, I thought.
I would later discover that police had been planning for this day for over a year. Operation Yurta, as they called it, was set up to find the source that had leaked a top-secret document to my friend and colleague Barry McCaffrey, who had led our investigation into the Loughinisland massacre at a pub in Co. Down in 1994, when six men were shot dead by loyalist paramilitaries. Barry had produced several stories for our
investigative website The Detail on the massacre and had been centrally involved – indeed, played a pivotal role both on and off screen – in the film on the subject, No Stone Unturned, which I had produced, and the New-York-based, Academy-Award-winning Alex Gibney had directed.
After the film premiered at the New York Film Festival in October 2017, the PSNI had contacted an English police force, Durham Constabulary. Not to reopen the investigation into the Loughinisland massacre, which the documentary was about, but to go after our source. The PSNI had previously called Durham in to examine the leaking of a secret Police Ombudsman of Northern Ireland (PONI) report into the murder of female RUC Constable Colleen McMurray in Newry in 1992. Now they had the team behind No Stone Unturned in their sights.
Darren Ellis was the top cop in charge at Durham and, judging from documents that would later be disclosed to us, he had been pushing for our arrest with nothing less than a myopic zeal. ‘Executive Action’ was how he had described it, as he appealed to his superiors to green light the operation. Ellis had ordered PSNI officers to arrest Barry, too; in fact they were doing just that at that very moment, five miles from my home. And in the centre of the city, more armed police were storming through the doors of our offices. All deployed at huge cost to find a journalist’s source.
While Andy Allen read out the list of alleged offences, I kept my head down, trying to work through what all this meant for my family. My eighty-year-old mother, who lived alone ninety minutes west in Enniskillen, would already be awake. Mia would have to call her or get hold of my younger brother, so he could tell her about this in person.
My incredulity was also rising. Raiding the house was one thing, but arresting a journalist in front of his family was something else. All because of a piece of A4 paper in a documentary? What the fuck was going on?
My phone was sitting on the coffee table in front of me. I could see my bank alerting me about direct debits due to be debited from my account on the last working day of the month. Today. It would have distracted me twenty minutes earlier; now my personal finances were the least of my worries.
I picked up the phone, hoping to at the very least spare myself the embarrassment of two detectives seeing my banking details, but Detective Constable McVicker reached out to prevent me from using the phone.
This caused a moment. Not a stand-off, exactly, but I certainly paused for a beat to take in what she had done. A journalist’s phone is a very sensitive device, holding numbers of and communications with contacts and sources, as well as all the other detritus of a digitally connected lifestyle.
We looked at each other as Andy Allen explained that I would have to hand over the phone. I set it back down on the coffee table. It was in that moment that I realised that I was no longer in control of my home, or, seemingly, my possessions. The calm but bewildered tone that Sheila had set was being overtaken by the first sparks of anger.
One of them asked me for the phone’s pin code. Caught off guard, I stepped back to think. Should I comply or not? I had a split second to weigh it all up.
I gave them it. I had nothing to hide and had done nothing wrong, so I decided why give them a chance to say that I had been uncooperative? Now, I would act differently, but then it felt like the right thing to do.
Given the sudden storm of their arrival, I had only thrown on a T-shirt and trousers, so I asked if I could dress properly before they took me to wherever they were going to take me. They granted the request, though a young officer was told to escort me upstairs to keep an eye on me. He watched me dress and brush my teeth before ensuring that I came back down into the hall, where Detective Allen was waiting.
Sheila was there, too, and I could see James sitting at the kitchen table, his face failing to hide his shock. I tried to lighten the mood, shouting to him something about how this is what happens if you make a documentary in Belfast. Sheila had returned to remonstrating with the moustached search officer. She was seething. I gave her a quick kiss and then, less than fifteen minutes since the police had arrived, I was led out of my front door to a waiting squad car.
Two officers were already in the front seats. Another uniformed officer opened the back passenger door and told me to get in. Andy Allen came around the car and joined me in the back.
As we drove away, my anger broke. ‘Are you arresting Ronnie Hawthorne this morning? Or are you only interested in journalists?’ I asked the detective.
He remained silent.
I shut up. There was no point shouting at them.
What I didn’t know was that Darren Ellis had in fact sent police to see Hawthorne, the chief suspect in the Loughinisland massacre. Not to question him, mind you, but to take the complaint that had helped Ellis and his colleagues find their way to arresting myself and Barry McCaffrey.
PART I
1 | Dressed to Kill
The neighbouring villages of Clough and Loughinisland in rural Co. Down are little more than five minutes apart, sitting at opposite corners of a geographic triangle with the historic town of Downpatrick to their east. Running between the two villages is a straight, wide road that facilitates locals and foreigners alike as they travel south for the beaches, golf courses and mountains of South Down.
On the summer evening of 18 June 1994, a red Triumph Acclaim car sped north out of Clough on this very road. The three occupants knew the car was somewhat unreliable, but they didn’t have a choice. It was a vehicle that had been supplied for this journey: a murderous journey.
The terrorists had chosen this long, warm Saturday evening for their attack, knowing the vast majority of their fellow people on the island of Ireland were gathered in homes, bars, clubs – really, wherever there were heavy-tube televisions – to watch a football match. The men were dressed to kill, in workmen’s blue boiler suits and woollen, black balaclavas. For one of the men in the Triumph in particular, the act of killing had become the core focus of his life. It was a life steeped in the sectarian hatred that over recent decades had come to mark and score this most beautiful and culturally rich landscape. Their victims were unknown to them, but their target was set. A two-roomed country pub that would be jammed to the doors. To the inhabitants of the car, it didn’t matter who they were or why they had made the choice to be in the pub; all that mattered was that they were Catholic.
Despite all the technological advances that paramilitaries in Ireland had embraced over the previous thirty years, the loyalist paramilitary
killing machine had failed to evolve beyond shooting unarmed innocents, usually in the back. An explanation for that lack of sophistication was typified by the man sitting in the front passenger seat of the Triumph, a pathological serial killer who had been travelling the roads of the Mourne County for many years, knowing he had total and complete impunity. He hadn’t needed to develop his tactics, hone his methodology or his ability to avoid prosecution. In his personal war on his neighbours, near and far, he was rewarded for his action by the very fact that he was free to do so, to carry on killing at will.
He was likely unaware, as he sped north, that his campaign of violence would end here, with a savage and brutal massacre of his close neighbours. What he was aware of, however – or what he would have felt, at least – was that he was part of a loyalist tradition that stretched back over a hundred years, to the time of Home Rule.
South Down has been a British parliamentary constituency since 1885, which, at the outbreak of the Troubles, took in the towns of Banbridge to the west and Newry to the south, while the boundary ran east to Warrenpoint and along the northern side of Carlingford Lough and up the Irish Sea coastline to the village of Kilclief.
Downpatrick, ten miles west of Kilclief, is the historic and political heart of the constituency. When the seat was established, it was first held by John Francis Small, a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) at Westminster, the official party for Irish MPs in the British House of Commons. The IPP would lead the push in Parliament for Home Rule, or self-government, for Dublin.
Prime Minister William Gladstone introduced the first Government of Ireland Bill, or Home Rule Bill, in 1886, but it was defeated in the House of Commons. A second attempt in 1893 was defeated in the House of Lords. In 1912 the Liberal Party Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, brought a third Home Rule Bill before parliament. Jeremiah MacVeagh, the MP for South Down at the time, was at the centre of the debate and produced a book
titled Home Rule in a Nutshell, which had an introduction by Winston Churchill, also a supporter of Home Rule. The two men would witness the Home Rule Bill gain Royal Assent in September 1914, even if its enactment was simultaneously delayed until after the First World War. Still, the gaining of that Royal Assent was enough to cause a storm in unionist Ulster, one that had been building in the preceding years.
The three men in the Triumph Acclaim car on their way to Loughinisland in June 1994 were speeding irrevocably towards violence. These men were convinced that they were members of the modern-day iteration of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), which first emerged as a ‘militant expression of Ulster Unionist opposition’ to the Third Home Rule Bill, according to historian Timothy Bowman in Carson’s Army: The Ulster Volunteer Force, 1910–22.
Unionists were undoubtedly preparing for conflict in the event of Home Rule. The son of an East Belfast whiskey distiller and former soldier, James Craig became one of two hard-line MPs who would lead unionism through this turbulent period. Craig had served in the British Army in South Africa and returned home to become an MP for East Down in 1906, later forming the Ulster Unionist Council, which would oppose any notion of Home Rule. With his military background and organisational skills, Craig was able to harness unionist opposition and, indeed, create a paramilitary force that would be prepared to fight should the need arise.
In 1912, with Asquith pushing his bill forward, the ‘Ulster Volunteers’ emerged, with its membership drawn from the Ulster Clubs, formed in the 1880s in reaction to the first Home Rule Bill, and the Orange Order. If Craig was the controlling military mind of unionism, its intellectual leader was Lord Edward Carson. Born in Dublin, he would become known as the ‘Uncrowned King of Ulster’. In February 1910 Carson became leader of the anti-Home Rule Irish unionists, effectively committing himself to the Ulster unionist cause. Prime Minister Asquith
and the Irish nationalists now had a devoted adversary determined to oppose any attempt to introduce Home Rule.
Under Craig and Carson, unionists embraced the ‘show of strength’, a tactic that would become a defining feature of their character throughout the rest of the century, embraced by loyalist paramilitaries as a reason for sectarian murder. In September 1911 a ‘monster demonstration’ attended by over 50,000 at Craig’s East Belfast home was a catalytic moment for unionism, which believed that the large numbers and fiery speeches would send a clear signal of intent to London. At one such gathering, Carson told his listeners, ‘Ulster sees in Irish nationalism a dark conspiracy, buttressed upon crime and incitement to outrage, maintained by ignorance and pandering to superstition.’
On Easter Tuesday, 9 April 1912, as Asquith was making the final preparations for his Home Rule Bill and a crew on board the Titanic were readying for their maiden voyage, there was another huge demonstration of unionist opposition to Asquith’s plans, with over 100,000 members of the newly established Ulster Volunteers marching through central Belfast to Balmoral, in the south of the city, where the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Andrew Bonar Law, led the platform party. Seventy special trains had been laid on for the demonstrators and several dozen English, Scottish and Welsh MPs were there to hear Bonar Law tell the crowd: ‘Once again you hold the pass, the pass for the Empire. You are a besieged city … The government has erected by their Parliament Act a boom against you to shut you off from the help of the British people. You will burst that boom. That help will come …’
Two days later, Asquith introduced the Third Home Rule Bill in the House of Commons. In Westminster, Unionist MPs and their Conservative allies fought the bill every step of the way. Back in Belfast, Carson and Craig rolled out another ‘show of strength’ on ‘Ulster Day’, 28 September. The leaders wanted to leave Asquith and the Irish nationalists in no doubt of the strength of opposition to Home Rule. On that day, over 470,000 men and women would sign the Solemn League and Covenant and the corresponding women’s declaration, pledging to use whatever means necessary to defeat Home Rule.
The Irish News described Ulster Day as a ‘grotesque production and political failure, though a comic success’. It told its readers on the Monday morning: ‘At last the curtain has been rung down on the Ulster Day farce, and we may hope for, at any rate, a temporary return to the civic pride on which Belfast prides itself so tremendously. The Carson circus having toured North East Ulster gave its final and greatest performance entitled, “Signing the Covenant”, in Belfast on Saturday, and wound up its fantastic career in a paroxysm of flag waving and noise, emblematic of the meaningless nonsense of the whole grotesque scheme from start to finish. The stage lost an actor manager when the law and politics claimed Sir Edward Carson. His unfailing instinct for theatrical effect was never better exemplified than on the Saturday in his “state” progress from the Ulster Hall to the City Hall. Something was expected from him as the central figure in the “historic” scene and he rose to the occasion splendidly.’
According to Timothy Bowman, the term ‘Ulster Volunteer Force’ ‘appears to have been used publicly for the first time by a former British Army Colonel Robert Sharman-Crawford when addressing Bangor Unionist Club on 22 December 1912’. The following month, on 13 January 1913, the UVF was formally established. Historians have debated the actual purpose of the organisation and whether Edward Carson really believed it would take on the British Army in the event of Home Rule. Professor Paul Bew of Queen’s University Belfast wrote that Carson created the UVF to help manage loyalist ‘hooligans’ in Belfast. There is no doubt it was formed to send a clear signal to London that the speeches and military drilling were now backed up by a private army determined to protect the Ulster Protestant tradition in the north-east corner of Ireland. Eoin MacNeill, a scholar and cultural activist born in Glenarm, Co. Antrim, who would become a leading figure in the events that led to the Easter Rising in 1916, wrote an article later in 1913 titled ‘The North Began’ for An Claidheamh Soluis (translation: The Sword of Light), which advocated for the establishment of an Irish national volunteer force. The Irish Volunteers, armed, drilled and led by MacNeill, would be formed in November 1913 to protect Home Rule should it be achieved. As regards
the UVF, MacNeill stated in his address to the inaugural meeting of the Irish Volunteers, ‘The more genuine and successful the [UVF] in Ulster becomes, the more completely does it establish the principle that Irishmen have the right to decide and govern their own national affairs. We have nothing to fear from the existing Volunteers in Ulster, nor they from us.’
The actions of the UVF, however, contradicted this claim. The organisation was intent on arming the thousands of unionists joining its ranks. In June 1913 the British government seized 7,000 Italian rifles destined for the UVF in Hammersmith in West London. The man behind the purchase of the weapons was Frederick Crawford, a former major in the British Army. Crawford had signed the Solemn League and Covenant in his own blood and was appointed as the UVF’s director of ordinance. He would later say he was ashamed to call himself an Irishman, saying, ‘I am an Ulsterman, a very different breed.’ He made no secret of his belief in armed resistance to Home Rule and had been involved in previous attempts to smuggle arms. In Carson’s Army, Bowman describes how Crawford had set up a ‘front firm’, John Ferguson and Company, with Sir William Bull MP, and successfully purchased Vickers machine guns at the significant cost of £300 each and ‘thousands of rifles’. The Hammersmith Inn, where the rifles were found, had been rented to the company owned by Bull and Crawford, who had written to arms manufacturers in Austria and Germany seeking to purchase 20,000 rifles and one million rounds of ammunition.
Around the same time, Durham Police Constabulary – which many years later, somewhat ironically, would find itself at the centre of the Loughinisland story – seized 150,000 rounds of ammunition destined for the UVF in a raid in the town of Stockton on the banks of the River Tees. In some cases, the unionists showed a degree of ingenuity in arming themselves. It was reported that 175 Martini-Enfield rifles were purchased from Harrods Department Store, destined for the Earl of Erne in Enniskillen.
Crawford’s determination to arm the UVF was undiminished by the setbacks in England. Less than a year after Hammersmith, he spent
over £45,000 of the UVF’s money on the purchase of 25,000 rifles and 3 million rounds of ammunition from a Jewish arms dealer called Bruno ‘Benny’ Spiro in Hamburg, Germany. On the last day of March 1914, on the Baltic island of Langeland, the weapons and ammunition were loaded onto the SS Fanny, which set sail for Ireland. Almost three weeks later, in the Bristol Channel, the shipment was transferred onto the SS Clyde Valley, which Crawford had purchased in Glasgow, and made the final part of its journey, north to Larne, where the headlights of 500 vehicles lit up the port on its arrival on 24 April. Over 2,500 UVF men had been mobilised on the North Down coast and ‘column after column’ of cars were used to disperse the consignment.
Given the scale of the gunrunning, nationalists were convinced there had been collusion between the British state and the UVF. Bowman recorded how one RIC officer told in his memoirs how the guns could have been seized on their arrival in Fermanagh: ‘I heard that the arms were to be brought that evening to the house of Mr J. Porter-Porter, of Belle Isle … I sat on the other side of the road … after a time along came the cars with their packages in the back. The arms were delivered and there was no interference at any time.’
The gun had been introduced into Irish politics. Carson, Crawford and the UVF had placed between 60,000 and 80,000 illegal rifles, according to estimates, into the hands of unionists across the North.
With the outbreak of the First World War in July 1914, the introduction of Home Rule was put on hold until the end of the conflict. An estimated 30,000 members of the UVF signed up for the newly created 36th Ulster Division of the British Army, where it incurred over 5,500 casualties over two days in the Battle of the Somme. The blood sacrifice would create a new generational bond between Ulster unionists and the British, although it was the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin that would change the political dynamic between Britain and Ireland forever. As Paul Bew wrote, ‘By the end of the war, Republican separatism had replaced the Home Rule movement as the pre-eminent nationalist political force in Ireland. However, the Irish state which Republicans fought to achieve was even less palatable to Ulster unionists than the Home Rule Parliament that
nationalists had sought before the war. The First World War, as well as dividing Europe, further polarised the peoples of Ireland. The two sides could not compromise, and the result was the partition of Ireland.’
The UVF had served its purpose, in keeping those six Ulster counties in unionist control. And it was this legacy that those three balaclava-clad killers likely thought they were continuing as they sped along in that red Triumph Acclaim towards Loughinisland.